Search

Find Us On

The recent post on Religious Right Watch, "Stealing Bibles," by The League looked at an organization, The Abimelechs, who steal Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms.

The trope of the Gideon Bible in a hotel room is firmly fixed in American culture, with references to hotel room bibles having been made in countless movies, novels, poems, and television shows. (The Gideon's distribution programs are international in scope, but the trope is almost certainly nowhere stronger than in the U.S.)

UK-based Flickr member Brothercake writes:

I was staying in a hotel in New York earlier this year, and I noticed that as well as the usual Gideon's bible, there was also a copy of the Quran. So that got me thinking - why limit the principle to religious books, why not get some science in there too?

So, I've decided that from now on, whenever I stay in a hotel room, I'm going to leave behind a copy of ... The Origin of Species.

Concerning his photo, "Gideon's Backlash," (above) he writes, "Here you see four copies freshly bought, at only £4 each, ready to take on my next trip."

Commenting on "Gideon's Backlash," Colin Purrington, Associate Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Swarthmore, who has a whole Flickr photoset called "Evolution Outreach,"

People's reaction to distributed tracts and religious books is strange sometimes, including, perhaps, my own once. This blogger spied an Italian Book of Mormon on top of a piano inside Santa Maria Del Popolo while visiting in Rome in 2000. I picked it up, toured the church, stayed for a bit of a Mass, left, and then chucked the book into the bin on my way back to my hotel. In retrospect, I find my action a bit odd and inappropriate. While the book was almost certainly left, without permission, as propoganda, I suppose there was a 1 in a million chance it had been accidentally left behind by a visitor who later came back looking for it. Either way, it wasn't mine to discard, nor my job to discard it. I'm sure the parish has a janitor for that.

Garry Wills in the November 16, 2006 edition of The New York Review of Books has a hard-hitting essay about the faith-based governance of the G. W. Bush administration and the damage it's done to the republic.

The right wing in America likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and even more specifically highly biblical. That was not true of that government or any later government—until 2000, when the fiction of the past became the reality of the present.

Wills intimates that Bush's principle of "compassionate conservatism," much touted during the 2000 election, was a warning of the faith-based social services Bush would impose if elected. Wills also reminds readers that these Bush policies weren't conjured up idly, but only with the advice, solicited by the administration, of the religious right.

Karl Rove had cultivated the extensive network of religious right organizations, and they were consulted at every step of the way as the administration set up its policies on gays, AIDS, condoms, abstinence programs, creationism, and other matters that concerned the evangelicals. All the evangelicals' resentments under previous presidents, including Republicans like Reagan and the first Bush, were now being addressed.

In writing about faith-based social services, Wills notes that in farming out social services away from government and to religious organizations, many representatives of the nation's black religio-political leadership were seen by the Bush administration as potential beneficiaries and allies. Additionally, outreach to the black religious community involved rank partisanship. Wills:

The aim was not to win the entire black community away from Democrats, but to shave a few points off the boost they normally gave to Democrats [on election nights]. With that in mind, the administration scheduled conferences to show blacks how to get grants in battleground states just before elections. Local Republican candidates attended, suggesting that religious grants would depend on their election. These events were organized by James Towey, the second man to direct the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

This operation bore fruit:

...black voters in Milwaukee received fliers from the influential black preacher Bishop Sedgwick Daniels urging them to vote for George Bush because "he shares our values." He also shared with Bishop Daniels $1.5 million of taxpayers' funds for faith-based initiatives.

I encourage you to read the entire essay, but in closing here it's worth highlighting two passages from Wills' examination of faith-based war. Wills looks at the actions of then deputy undersecretary for defense intelligence, General William "Jerry" Boykin (photo), who gave slideshow lectures in churches during the Iraq war. He appeared in uniform and in his lectures would declare about George W. Bush, "'[W]why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him....I tell you this morning he's in the White House because God put him there...."

Boykin goes on to say, "The battle this nation is in is a spiritual battle, it's a battle for our soul. And the enemy is a guy called Satan...."

Wills:

Boykin was just repeating what other evangelicals had been saying about the war in Iraq. Charles Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote: "We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible.... God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers." Jerry Falwell put it succinctly in 2004: "God is pro-war." For some evangelicals, this was a war against the enemies of Israel, who are by definition anti-God. The evangelical writer Tim LaHaye called it, therefore, "a focal point of end-time events." For others, it was a chance to spread Christianity to the infidels. An article syndicated on the Southern Baptist Convention's wire service said that "American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, and Marvin Olasky, the inventor of Bush's "compassionate conservatism," agreed. Boykin's was not a lone voice, then, but that of a member in good standing of the community that supported Bush on religious grounds, even in his warfare.

But the most chilling passage in Wills' essay is near the end, in which he describes the administration of the occupation of Iraq as a grotesque nexus of Christian rightwing ideology and malignant partisanship:

The...director of personnel for the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority (headed by Catholic convert Paul Bremer) was the White House liaison to the Pentagon, James O'Beirne, a conservative Catholic married to National Revieweditor Kate O'Beirne. Those recruited to serve in the CPA were asked if they had voted for Bush, and what their views were on Roe v. Wade and capital punishment. O'Beirne trolled the conservative foundations, Republican congressional staffs, and evangelical schools for his loyalist appointees. Relatives of prominent Republicans were appointed, and staffers from offices like that of Senator Rick Santorum. Right moral attitude was more important than competence.

That was proved when the first director of Iraqi health services, Dr. Frederick Burkle, was dismissed. Burkle, a distinguished physician, was a specialist in disaster relief, with experience in Kosovo, Somalia, and Kurdish Iraq. His replacement, James Haveman, had run a Christian adoption agency meant to discourage women from having abortions. Haveman placed an early emphasis on preventing Iraqis from smoking, while ruined hospitals went untended.

"The Abimelechs are an association of Atheist commercial, business, and professional men and women who have as one of their objects: The removal from circulation of the so-called Word of God or Holy Bible, from hotels, motels, hospitals, school classrooms, university dormitories, penal institutions, and many other places, and by the confiscation of New Testaments from school children, service personnel, and nurses.

The Association was founded in Canada... by a couple of Freethinkers who, in a hotel room, found the only reading material to be a Gideon Bible, and were angered by this overt propaganda by the Christians and decided to do something about it. There are now adherents in many countries around the world, and thousands of Bibles and New Testaments have been withdrawn from circulation, confiscated, destroyed, or put to some useful purpose.

The Abimelechs named themselves after the bastard son of Gideon and his followers who, in the story related in ninth Chapter of the Book of Judges, were inspired to usurp the work of the Judge Gideon and his associates, who had wrought havoc upon the many peoples whose religious beliefs differed from their own conviction that Yahweh was the Only True God. "

This interesting organization's tactic is as intellectually dishonest as the evangelicals who distribute the free Bibles in the first place. Instead of countering the propaganda by addressing it, the Abimelechs vainly attempt to destroy the Christian message. The problem with this method goes beyond its daunting futility. It is also a blatant suppression of ideas that flies in the face of everything open-mindedness stands for.

Perhaps a better approach would be to place one of the great atheist tracts alongside the Bible. Imagine opening a hotel desk drawer to find not only a Gideon Bible but an Abimelech-distributed copy of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian. Instead of suppressing an exchange of ideas, how about exposing millions to arguments and facts that prove that Christianity is a farce? That would do far more to liberate Christians from their false religion than stealing some Bibles ever could.

Michelle Goldberg interviews longtime war correspondent (and former divinity school student) Chris Hedges for Salon.com about his new book, American Fascists, which examines the Christian Right and reaches the conclusion that it is a "'deeply anti-democratic movement' that gains force by exploiting Americans' fears."

the latest piece of dubious advice from the consultantocracy that is shaping the Democratic Party's approach to religion in public life. [He] noted that Antonin Scalia and his friends on the religious right are undoubtedly laughing and rubbing their hands with glee at the latest Democratic Party capitulation to their world view.